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Dr. Paul L. Hartman


Dr. Paul L. Hartman
PhD, Logistics, 2013
MS. Logistics Management, 1997

Dr. Paul Hartman is the Director of the Center for Operational Analysis (COA).  The COA is a premier research facility within the Air Force Institute of Technology (AFIT) Graduate School of Engineering and Management, focused on providing world-class logistics, operations, and supply chain management research to solve real-world challenges in near real-world time facing the Air Force and other organizations within the DoD. 

“COA is here to serve the interests of USAF and DoD senior leadership.  We honor the education, research and consultation mission of AFIT.  We think that all of the work that we do in the consultation mode should be used to inform the research and education process of AFIT.  When our faculty members serve on our consultation projects, they will be able to take the information and understanding from solving that problem and turn it into real research that is value added to the discussion in their classroom.  We aren’t just reciting textbooks to our students; we are showing them how the information applies to our AF and DoD.”

Current research in the COA includes building a decision support analytic tool for the USAF Blue Horizon Fellows, a group of 15 Air War College students hand-picked to address a specific question on behalf of the Chief of Staff.  “The decision support model that we built for them - the Logistics Decision Support Tool - allows leaders to look at the logistics impact of moving forces from one location to another and make an informed impact analysis decision based on the data.”  Under the leadership of Major Heidi Tucholski, Assistant Professor of Operations Research, the COA has extended the value of this tool into PACAF theater to support their Adaptive Basing concept.

Dr. Hartman and his team are also involved in a several projects supporting USAF interest in the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program.  From advanced modeling and simulation, to business case analysis, “we are excited about what we are doing!  We have a fantastic ability to do really good things for the USAF.  When I was at AFIT in 1996, I wrote my master’s thesis on International Armaments Cooperation in the Post-Cold War Era.  International armaments cooperation for the AF at that time was the Joint Strike Fighter program.  Twenty years later and here I am today working with the Chief of Staff’s F-35 Integration Office to figure out ways to improve the USAF’s ability to get that program fielded and to bring that next generation warfighting capability into the USAF mission set.”

Dr. Hartman has nearly 30 years of demonstrated expertise serving in a wide variety of program management, supply chain management, maintenance management and logistics policy positions.  He earned a M.S. degree in Logistics Management from AFIT in 1997 and a M.A. in International Affairs from the University of Dayton in 1998.  In 2013, Dr. Hartman was the first student to earn a PhD in Logistics from AFIT.  The program was designed to combine an analytical core with a flexible program to accommodate defense-focused supply chain management, acquisition, inventory theory, transportation, and operations management thrust areas. 

Dr. Hartman’s dissertation research, The Outsourcing-to-Insourcing Relocation Shift: A Response of U.S. Manufacturers to the Outsourcing Paradigm, was sponsored by the Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Logistics and Product Support.  His research examined 24 manufacturing organizations and included 14 specific cases studies where an organization had outsourced manufacturing functions to achieve strategic objectives only to discover that their long-term intended objectives were not achieved.  This resulted in executive-level decisions, based on limited decision-quality data, to insource the manufacturing workload back inside their organizations then quickly discovering that they have underestimated the level of resources and skills required to perform the insourced workload.  The case studies demonstrated that there was an absence of formal decision making processes supporting the executive-level decision and that the insourcing decision did not result in organization-specific goal achievement.  Dr. Hartman’s research findings are now used to inform USAF Senior Leader decisions concerning insourcing of 5th and 6th generation weapon systems into the USAF depot enterprise to meet Congressionally mandated requirements and help the USAF Senior Leaders avoid the many pitfalls of transitioning workload into its organic operations.

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